Skinner put his own dang baby in a box. Skinner would put anyone he was allowed to in a box. He was just that kind of dude.

keepsakewhales:

Fun fact: I met a professor dude at a grad school party once who had lived  next door to the Skinners. He said that their 12-year-old daughter would climb up a tree in their yard naked and just scream. 

Wonder who reinforced that behavior!

To be fair, though, Skinner’s baby box actually sounds pretty neat and his motivations reasonable enough, both for the child and the parents (or, realistically, the mother, who would do most of the child care and laundry):

fierceawakening:

Yep. Skinner saw people as reactions to stimuli, basically.

Skinner was particularly concerned about rearing a baby in the harsh
environment of Minnesota where he lived and worked. Keeping the child
warm was a central priority. Traditionally, this meant wrapping the baby
in clothes and blankets. This not only inhibited the child’s
self-directed movement, but the baby could easily overheat as well. It
also meant labor for parents, from more laundry to frequent bathing of
the child.

The air crib was intended to dispense with these concerns. In terms
of design, the air crib was basically an oversized metal crib but with a
ceiling, three solid walls and a safety-glass pane at the front which
could be lowered to move the baby in and out of the crib. Canvas was
stretched to create a floor. Sheeting was be rolled on top of the canvas
and easily rolled off when soiled. Parents regulated the temperature
and humidity of the crib via a control box on top of the crib and clean
air was filtered into the crib from below. The crib was also higher than
other cribs of the day, allowing easier access to the child without the
burden of stooping over.

Skinner’s second daughter, Deborah slept and played in this new crib
during the first 2 years of her life. By all accounts she had a healthy,
happy childhood and adulthood. The cribs were commercially produced and
it is estimated that over 300 children were raised in them. Psychology Today
ran a short piece on the air crib where the authors tracked down 50
children that used the air crib. The results for these children were
positive and the parents enjoyed using the crib. Yvonne also believed it
was superior to a standard crib (Epstein, 1995).

(from https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/skinner-air-crib )

discoursedrome:

I was staying out of it but since it keeps coming up on my dash: the “depression is caused by social circumstances” thing is stupid, not least because it’s clearly trying to sell you ideology as hard as pharma is trying to sell you drugs. (I’m assuming people in this orbit know what post I’m talking about because I’ve seen it 25 times in the past two weeks.)

Many, many, many medical syndromes only become problems when combined with specific environmental factors. That’s the norm. This argument against the “biomedical model of depression” (gag) is like saying that we need to stop medicalizing hemophilia because the real problem is that society is causing people to get cut, and besides, everyone recognizes that some factors will cause anyone to bleed to death, and we don’t call that a medical disorder! Of course you would suplex anyone who said that, but the only actual difference here is that a) we currently know less about the physiological etiology of depression and b) we’re predisposed to view mood disorders as non-medical because they interact weirdly with our model of agency.

The piece in question is just one more variation on the evergreen “societal degeneracy causes existential malaise” trope; it’s working a leftist angle in this case but it’s basically the same gimmick as “ADHD is caused by bad parenting”. It’s a disreputable line of argument used in service of a disreputable agenda, and it’s important to develop antibodies against that entire genus of arguments because they mutate rapidly.

Here’s the kernel of truth: when a negative symptom depends on both an environmental and medical factor, you should investigate both and begin by tackling whichever is easiest. It’s usually easier to stop mixing raw sewage with drinking water than it is to cure cholera and parasites, for instance (though absolutely you want to do both). On the other hand, it’s usually easier to give vitamin supplements to people living on shitty diets long-term than to deal with whatever is requiring to do that. The age of sail was basically terrible from a social and ethical standpoint, but even still we’d laugh at anyone who complained about giving sailors vitamin C because it wasn’t addressing the oppressive social regime that caused scurvy. If there’s a lot of weight and investment behind social systems that harm people, you are never going to build a stack of victims high enough to dissolve those systems out of shame.

It is an actual fact that most antidepressants – most mood disorder drugs overall – are really shitty, and that they are overprescribed in spite of this because of sleazy marketing. We don’t know that much about how this shit works and it’s seemingly pretty difficult to alter someone’s baseline long-term without also rendering them nonfunctional or causing massive organ failure. There is a hell of a lot of work left to be done in this area. But it’s virtually certain that we’ll have a pharmaceutical solution before we have a social one, and even right now I’d say that drugs are a better prospect than lifestyle changes for most people with chronic depression. You can, of course, try both at the same time. But the kind of person who advocates a treatment before all others on the grounds that it’s the “real” or “root” treatment, rather than on the basis of how easy it is or how likely it is to produce immediate improvements, is someone who cares less about how your problems affect you than about what they symbolize.

stimmyabby:

I feel like there is this phenomenon that all people can have but autistic people are more likely to which is like, social comprehension that is missing the connector bits? Like you can care about not upsetting people and have a relatively sophisticated understanding of which ways to behave in order to avoid upsetting people and still not understand basic things about *why* people feel the way they do about the way you behave. Which can be one of many reasons someone can seem socially competent then do something really obtuse, because it’s harder to generalize and derive answers from new situations. 

jurassicbae:

lordthundercox:

aspiring-cryptid:

yall know how tlj snoke is dressed exactly like freckle in the “sometimes… things that are expensive…. are worse” scene??? 

well

Excellent.

I am deceased

I am so glad I watched TLJ yesterday so I could see this now

QUIZ: How Indecisive Are You, On a Scale of 1 to Hamlet?

jumpingjacktrash:

on a scale of one to hamlet, i got henry v

I got Hamlet

“You[r] indecisiveness has reached Hamlet-level proportions. Like Hamlet,
you tend to waffle about, unable to commit to a solid course of action. Unlike
Hamlet, you have not caused the death of multiple people, nor have you
touched a skull and waxed poetic about life and death. Or maybe you have
done those things, I don’t know. Either way, you are a terrible
decision-maker and should probably avoid making decisions for your sake
as well as everyone else’s.“

QUIZ: How Indecisive Are You, On a Scale of 1 to Hamlet?

resumespeak:

kai-skai:

cocainesocialist:

idea for a hot new silicon valley start up: i call it uNion. a revolutionary start-up offering p2p interactions that will enable integrated partnerships between creators at different enterprises and across platforms, allowing them to disrupt the old wage-labour paradigms and leverage improved bargaining models across ventures and supply chains with absolutely unlimited scalability. 

@resumespeak look, someone stole your blog’s thing

@kai-skai if wrapping the idea in jargon could get rapacious capitalist techbro money to support the collective empowerment of workers, I would happily surrender my thing.

that’s pretty much what I expected 🙂

roachpatrol:

tharook:

asksecularwitch:

vincentvangozer:

derinthemadscientist:

mickeyrowan:

having a flesh vessel is so annoying?????? like they have to be constantly watered, they have to be in specific temperature range to be comfortable, i’ve had a headache for like seven hours and nothing i do will get rid of it,

physical forms are so inconvenient??????????????

I knocked mine over yesterday and scraped off some of the outer barrier and it keeps sending me really annoying warning messages about it

blood.dll has caused an access violation exception

I still can’t figure off how to turn off the monthly compile time. It goes for like 7 days wrecks all the system and takes so much CPU time. 

I got the wrong model, too, and there’s no returns or exchange policy. I’m trying to make do as best I can with aftermarket modifications, but even that’s a real bind. And then I have to deal with all the purists who try to tell me I should be happy with the model I was given.

the beard texture takes FOREVER to load even WITH the aftermarket mods

and don’t even get me started on the horribly vague and useless errors and warnings, I took it out for a hike today and now one of the joints throws up an incredibly annoying error every time I use it, and last time that happened I even took it into the shop and not even they could tell me what the hell’s going on, let alone fix it. who the hell coded this thing. shoddy.

cocainesocialist:

idea for a hot new silicon valley start up: i call it uNion. a revolutionary start-up offering p2p interactions that will enable integrated partnerships between creators at different enterprises and across platforms, allowing them to disrupt the old wage-labour paradigms and leverage improved bargaining models across ventures and supply chains with absolutely unlimited scalability. 

@resumespeak look, someone stole your blog’s thing